Below you’ll find an unexpurgated excerpt from Pres. Obama’s closing remarks at today’s so-called “Fiscal Responsibility Summit.” Really. He actually said this. Not a parody.  Read it and try to imagine a leader like Lincoln, Churchill, Reagan . . . Bush—in a billion years—sounding like this in a time of national crisis.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Now, I want to make sure that the conversation doesn’t end when we go home today. We’ve got a lot of hard choices to make, we need to build off this afternoon’s conversation and work together to forge a consensus.  So, one of the things that I’m hoping to do, is that my team–each of whom were taking copious notes during the course of these respective break-out sessions–will issue a report, or a summary of the conversation.  It will be distributed to each of the participants in those respective discussions. We will then ask for concrete ideas either about substance or process, and we will ask that you get those back so that we can then issue a final report coming out of this conversation in 30 days.  And I think somebody just dubbed it “the fiscal sustainability project.”  So, that’s as good of a name as any.

Agreed.  Pretty much any name works for this pathetic farrago. The President of the United States of America wasn’t done, though . . .

OBAMA: And the idea then is that there will be a constant loop between the White House and all of you about how we should move forward on this, and hopefully this will start, uh, uh, breaking down into some concrete takeaways and tasks. Some of the recommendations that have been made are already reflected in the budget that we are proposing.  Some new ideas may have arisen that we did not think of, and that can be incorporated as the budget process moves forward in congress.   And so we are very much looking forward to hearing from your ideas both about process and about substance.

It would be funny if it weren’t so pitiful.  OK, it is funny.  But disturbing, too, to think this is the person America must count on to lead the country during these challenging times.

Note: let’s not forget that, depending how things turn out in the Minnesota senate race, the “real” Stuart Smalley might be coming to Washington.  Which is all just as well, I suppose.  The president will surely be in a need of a good hug.